No scorn at all, but I don’t agree. Beyond tweaking to adjust the exposure or skin tones or for a specific design purpose, I’m not a huge fan of colour engineering, Instagram filters to add faux old timey effects, and all that jazz. When I take a colour photo, that specific combination of colours (together with lighting and composition) will inevitably have been an integral part of the very reason I wanted to take that picture in the first place (even if these decisions were instinctive rather than conscious), so why would I want to change it?

Not quite the same thing, but my pet hate at the moment – which I keep seeing examples of on on Pinterest – is old black and white portraits of Hollywood stars that somebody has recently decided (ie it’s not a creative decision by the original photographer) would be improved by adding colour – completely ignoring the fact that the tones, shadows, contrast and all-round picture quality of black and white photography are completely different from those of colour.

No matter how carefully and lovingly this is done, I find it stupid, presumptuous and incredibly disrespectful of the original artist – and the results never look like like colour photographs anyway; they just look hand-tinted. For some reason, people who disapprove of colorisation of old movies don’t seem to object to this practice, which I find just as invidious. The other day I saw a Clarence Sinclair Bull portrait of Greta Garbo colorised like this. How DARE they?

It’s one of the reasons I haven’t taken any black and white photos lately (still bearing in my mind your useful suggestions on this). Going back to thinking in black and white might take some time and effort – I would probably have to learn to think in black and white again, and take nothing but monochrome for a while.

(Sorry – rambled a bit there, not to mention ranted… Not directed at you.)

I don’t mind a ramble, it can lead to interesting places/ideas and a ‘rant’ shows that a person has passion for the subject. 🙂

I fully agree with your disagreement, for the reasons you stated. It just struck me as such a superbly strong composition that if you wished (and found the time) to experiment with a bit of colour to B&W conversion it might be an easy one to start with, even if it was not originally intended for such treatment. (Before I ‘flapped my yap’, I did fiddle about with the colour settings on my monitor to make it look B&W-ish and it still looks good.)

(Don’t know where the red thing came from, the picture must have triggered a faint memory of something else. Probably a film poster?)

Colourisation is a fraud.

If you (not you, you, but a generic you) take a photo with the specific intention of ‘washing out’ the colour to produce a B&W shot, then to me that is OK, Since the colour is extraneous information.

But if you take an old B&W photo and try to put colour information back in that is dishonest, as it is at best guesswork, at worst it is outright fabrication. They even get the colours and the textures completely wrong, using colours that didn’t exist at the time, (like shocking pink!) and they put a bright sheen on lisle stockings. a plague on all their houses, grumble, grumble.

(To demonstrate why it is impossible to recover the info here is a link to an advert, same model, same lighting, different film stock, wildly diffferent results.

If the notations were not there I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what the original colours were.)

Now because I am a Grade A hypocrite, there is one exception. When photos of WWI soldiers and sailors are done, they seem much less distant and more ‘connected’ to ‘us’, rather than distant, dusty far off people from another time. (I ‘feels’ legitimate because the colours are known from surviving uniforms, (they can’t quite recapture the skin tone, a coal miner or factory hand would be pasty white, (CoCo had yet to create the fad for sunbathing), where a farmhand would be ruddy faced or as brown as a nut.)

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